Zadie Smith - Changing My Mind - Occasional Essays

Clooney himself avoids the camera, slinking through the film as unobtrusively as a star can. In a film that is about editorializing and is itself heavily editorialized, Clooney edits himself out for the sake of the material. Into the Clooney-shaped hole slips an accomplished ensemble cast-Tate Donovan, Reed Diamond, Jeff Daniels, Robert Downey Jr., Patricia Clarkson-all of whom back up David Strathairn’s pitch-perfect Murrow impersonation by being entirely convincing newshounds. Well, all but one. I think you know who I’m talking about. Mr. Downey remains the most aggressive scene stealer in Hollywood. He’s barely restrained here, but if someone doesn’t give him free rein soon, there’s a danger of auto-combustion.

I digress. Like Murrow-the campaigning television broadcaster who squared off against Senator McCarthy in the mid-1950s-Clooney uses the “wires and lights” of his medium to make simple, forceful arguments. His case against McCarthy is familiar and correct: the paranoid fervor of McCarthyism placed the right to fair trial and the rights of the First Amendment under serious threat. Today, these rights are endangered once more. “We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home,” argues Murrow in 1956, foreshadowing our present concerns. Clooney doesn’t have to push hard for analogies like this-they’re everywhere. In fact, they’re a little too easy, and so admiring is he of Murrow that he follows his hero’s editorial style to the letter. (Clooney has always seemed boyishly prone to masculine hero worship, from his consecration of his own newscaster father to the re-creation-both on- and offscreen-of Sinatra’s rat-pack heyday.) Just as Murrow gave McCarthy enough rope to hang himself by allowing him “right to reply” on Murrow’s own prime-time show, See It Now, so Clooney refrains from casting an actor as McCarthy and simply replays the archive film. The edited archive film. He chooses all the same shots as Murrow did for his TV show: the off-guard, twitching, sweating, hysterical McCarthy, asking pointless questions, chasing phantoms that were not there.

Clooney clearly believes, like Murrow, that his editorializing has truth on its side. He has a case. Sometimes there is no “other side of the argument.” Nazis have no right of reply. Ed Murrow made a bet that what was pinko liberal thinking in 1956 would prove to be a condition of basic humanity fifty years later. He was wrong. The basic human rights he defended are once again assailed. Clooney is angry about that.

This must be why he cuts into his movie Murrow’s selectively edited footage of McCarthy’s interrogation of Annie Moss, an elderly, uneducated black woman whose Communist connections-McCarthy believed-had led her to seek a job inside the Pentagon. We see this meek woman verbally bullied and cheated of her right to see the evidence put against her. We are led to believe she knows nothing of the charges. One senator tries to help her. McCarthy leaves the hearing. Bobby Kennedy sits at the end of the table of senators, failing to come to her aid.

What evil breeds where good men stay silent! So we are meant to think. And this is a true liberal principle, as is the principle that no one should be tried without seeing the evidence held against them. Yet it remains disappointing to go on the Internet, in a shameful state of historical innocence, and discover that Bobby Kennedy was a good friend of Senator McCarthy and that Annie Moss was, as it happens, a member of the Communist Party. Clooney could have included gray areas such as this and still have made a fine liberal argument. It’s a sure sign that things are bad when the Left, like the Right, wants its history black and white.

Casanova is a silly film. Half Carry On, half Shakespearean comedy, everyone in it is perfectly nice and should reassemble to make a lively Twelfth Night. The trouble here is that the words are not by Shakespeare but rather by one Kimberly Simi, who worked as an attorney before selling this script. It has Heath Ledger sounding like James Mason with a soupçon of Peter O’Toole. It has tights and bosoms. It has mistaken identity, gender switching, girls wearing mustaches, a shrew tamed, hearts sundered then reattached and finally a journey by sea. Some of the best writing is in the program notes: “Sienna Miller… catapulted into the public eye when she appeared in the BBC comedy Bedtime .” Strange. That’s not how I remember it. Speaking of the young actress, she might ask hair and makeup how it is possible to make a preternaturally pretty twenty-two-year-old look like a dull matron. In the film, Francesca Bruni, for that is the character’s name, is secretly writing a feminist tract called “The Subjugation of Women” under a nom de plume-maybe that was the reasoning. Feminists can’t be blond and must have big eyebrows. I would love it if Miss Miller was secretly the author of the works of Elaine Showalter. I fear it is not so.

Some cinematic seasons throw up abstract questions. In the early 1990s a clutch of movies asked: What is adulthood? Children found themselves in the bodies of adults, and vice versa. Adults left children home alone. Children were shrunk by careless fathers. Babies started talking with the voice of John Travolta. It may be vocational myopia on my part, but this year I hear the question “What is a writer?” In Hidden (released in the United States as Caché) the answer is painful: writers are petty bourgeois. In Good Night, and Good Luck it’s the writer as hero, noble champion of the people. In Casanova she’s a harmless firebrand, in Memoirs of a Geisha, a naïf who simply records events as they happen. In both Get Rich or Die Tryin’ and Walk the Line the writer is an alchemist, turning pain into gold.

Why all the sudden concern with scribblers? Writers like to flatter themselves that in times of communal trauma people turn to the written word for comfort and direction. Maybe once. But in the noughties we’ve begun to legislate against language itself: writers are not to be trusted. They are double-dealers. For this reason, Capote, despite its 1950s setting, is timely. When people rail against the “media,” the bogeymen they have in mind owe not a little to the specter of Truman Capote. What is a writer? He knocks on your door with a smile, a pen and a shard of ice in his heart. Around that shard Philip Seymour Hoffman molds his tremendous Capote impersonation, by turns fey, friendly, oleaginous, deadly. He is Janus-faced. In New York, he’s a quixotic queen laughing in smoky nightclubs at the stupidity of his own readers; in Holcomb, Kansas, he does a damn good impression of being the boy next door. He’ll turn up at the sheriff’s house early in the morning with doughnuts and coffee, find the sheriff’s wife alone and explain he came on a whim to eat breakfast with her. She wanders off to get plates. Slowly the camera and Hoffman slink to the left into a side room where little Perry Smith, multiple murderer, is locked up in a cell.

The sea change that comes over Hoffman’s face during this pan shot is as close as silence comes to narrative. His Capote coolly dissembles, yet he is impassioned; he lied to get into the house, and yet he came to uncover truths. He is a writer: a man who tells the truth by lying. An actor of Hoffman’s caliber, who also tells the truth that way, can’t help but have a deep understanding of writerly psychology. “When I think of how good it could be,” wrote Capote of his unwritten book, “I can hardly breathe.” When Hoffman says these lines-sexually, venally, desperately-you fear him and yourself. How far will he go for a good story? How far will you go with him to hear it?